CRITICAL PERSPECTIVESCritical Perspectives on Whiteness and Technoscience: An Introduction

Jennifer A. Hamilton Hampshire College jhamilton@hampshire.edu

The six essays that comprise this “Critical Perspectives” section were
originally presented at the 2017 Society for the Social Studies of
Science (4S) meeting held in Boston, part of a double session on
“Whiteness and Technoscience.” Panel organizers asked
participants to open “the ‘black box’ of whiteness” and to explore how
whiteness works in organizing the production and consumption of
technoscientific forms. This rich set of short papers offers
genealogies of specific technologies and critical analytical
interventions in understanding how whiteness functions at a time of
ascendant white supremacy and escalating violence organized around
white nationalism. Authors focus on whiteness and its centrality to the
structures and content of digital platforms, social media, and
information technologies. These papers, and especially the larger works
of which they are part, engage deeply with the how:
how is it that whiteness as a racial formation, while shifting and
fluid, nevertheless continues to be a “durable preoccupation” (Pollock,
2012) in technoscientific domains? The authors were challenged to think
through the following questions in their work:

How does whiteness travel across and through technoscience?

How does technoscience reproduce and perpetuate
whiteness as a racial, economic, and
epistemological norm?

What investments in whiteness does technoscience produce and reinforce?

Each of these papers explores these questions by locating whiteness in
a different site of technoscientific production. The first three
papers move from the policing of online child pornography (Thakor) to
the affective domain of free/open source software (Nguyen) to the
emergence of creative industries in new configurations of global
capital (Irani). The following three papers focus on white
nationalism and mainstream gay pornography in digital domains (Keilty),
the emergence of post-racial and post-labor imaginaries as part of the
“affirmation of US racial empire” (Atanasoski and Vora), and the
militarized automation of biology as a key site where older colonial
epistemologies are reworked in the present (Schaeffer).

The authors challenge the ways in which visions of technoscience orient
themselves to particular notions of freedom, notions that rely on
whiteness as the transcendence of difference, as egalitarian impulse,
and as a key site for the enactment of the liberating potential of
technology. Each offers provocations urging us to rethink the dominant
emancipatory rhetoric that still frames narratives of technoscience:
the insistence that access to technology can free “us” from relations
of inequality, especially those structured by race and capitalism.
Further these papers link these seemingly emancipatory frames to
ongoing exploitation and inequality through an analysis of both the
cultural content and the structural logics that underpin racialized and
gendered laboring bodies, content and logics that continue to locate
white men as the pinnacle of civilization. Building on longstanding
feminist genealogies of technoscientific knowledge production, these
essays insist on the necessity of feminist approaches to science and
technology studies (STS) and on bringing STS into conversation with
other literatures, including critical race theory, queer studies, and
decolonial and postcolonial approaches.

In what follows, I summarize the papers and put them into conversation
with some theoretical tools that center whiteness and white supremacy
and suggest how these can be usefully extended to the analysis of
technoscience. How does whiteness orient technoscience not only in
terms of the kinds of technologies produced but also in terms of the
kinds of questions that get asked and to what effect? How are such
terms articulated in a mode of generalizable (white) humanity?

Individual Papers

Mitali Thakor’s work on the digital automation of the detection of
child pornography exposes how race is made visible in some domains
while making it invisible in others. The focus of Thakor’s paper is on
how large sets of digital data ─ images and written records ─ are
collated, processed, and interpreted (i.e., “made apparent” or
“apprehensible”) in order to address specific legislative and
evidentiary concerns in the larger political domains of child abuse and
child trafficking. A key dimension of this apprehensibility is
race, “that in order to know what
to detect one must become knowledgeable about the object (e.g., data,
face, person) sought”. Thakor demonstrates how this apprehensibility
becomes instantiated in technological applications and argues for the
careful critical (and ethnographic) attention to the design and
implementation of algorithmic processes.

Lilly Irani’s contribution focuses on the emergence of design thinking
at the turn of the twenty-first century, charting how creative
industries became ascendant in a reconfigured global workplace. In
particular, she critically challenges design thinking as simply an
innovative mode of capitalist production where (smart) workers can
escape the challenges of automation and rebrand their labor as
“right-brained” and creative (as opposed to “left-brained” and
logical). Irani demonstrates that despite its appealing rhetoric,
design-thinking cannot be decoupled from shifts in global production
and flows of labor, especially in terms of the manufacture of goods for
consumer markets; thus, design thinking “articulates a racialized
understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to
maintain (white) Americans at the apex of global hierarchies of labor”.

In her discussion of free/open source software and interactions between
Vietnamese and European actors, Lilly Nguyen offers a fine-grained
ethnographic analysis of “freedom” and argues that its articulations by
different actors reflect “not a value, not an ideology, nor discourse,
but a moral affect,” giving “shape to the possibilities of feeling and
desire”. She describes “the techno-aesthetication of whiteness,” where
human creativity, flourishing, and freedom emerge from a racialized
affective domain, one that masks global relations of power and the
necessity of labor (human and otherwise) for its manifestation.

In her discussion of free/open source software and interactions between
Vietnamese and European actors, Lilly Nguyen offers a fine-grained
ethnographic analysis of “freedom” and argues that its articulations by
different actors reflect “not a value, not an ideology, nor discourse,
but a moral affect,” giving “shape to the possibilities of feeling and
desire”. She describes “the techno-aesthetication of whiteness,” where
human creativity, flourishing, and freedom emerge from a racialized
affective domain, one that masks global relations of power and the
necessity of labor (human and otherwise) for its manifestation.

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora introduce the concept of
“technoliberalism,” “the way in which liberal modernity’s simultaneous
and contradictory obsession with race and the overcoming of racism has
once again been innovated at the start of the 21st century…through the
frame of a post-labor world”. To explore technoliberalism, they
describe a recent YouTube video that parodies Trump’s (still largely
imaginary) border wall between the United States and Mexico. A key
insight of this paper is that the liberal desire for a post-racial
world nevertheless depends heavily on white supremacy for its
legibility. The authors demonstrate “how technological imaginaries that
argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking US jobs,
pin their anti-racist logics on a post-racial technological future”.

Patrick Keilty explores the figure of “the millennial male” who, after
having been neglected by the “female-focused” content of the Internet,
(re)stakes his digital claim to masculinity in the almost exclusively
heterosexual and white domain of online pornographic platforms.
Keilty demonstrates “how the homosocial and homosexual deploy
similar iconographies of wholesome whiteness in the service of white
nationalism, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy”, advocating for
sustained attention to both infrastructural and cultural dimensions of
social media, especially in the larger political context of Trump’s
America.

Finally, Felicity Schaeffer attends to the racial imaginaries that
drive military research programs, focusing on the emergence of biorobotics,
a field that looks to capitalize on the potential of (human and
non-human) biological life in constructing new kinds of robots.
Schaeffer specifically investigates the role of this research in “the
expansion of…a border-biosecurity industrial complex”, one that
articulates innovations in surveillance as key strategies in national
security. She develops the concept of “the suspect biomass,” a
racialized entity “produced at the intersection of the life sciences
and rapid computational algorithms” in opposition to safe (white)
populations.

Whiteness

A key insight of earlier critical race scholars was that whiteness
formed a normative, largely invisible background against which other,
more explicit modes of racial formation were articulated and through
which the power of race and racism was wielded (e.g., Delgado &
Stefancic, 1997; see also e.g., Brodkin, 1998; Frankenberg, 1993). The
power of whiteness as racial formation lies in its heterogeneity across
space and time, its ability to shape-shift, and to intersect in complex
ways with other forms of power (Carter, 2007; Crenshaw, 1992;
Markowitz, 2001). To identify and understand the work of whiteness in
contemporary technoscience requires a careful excavation of its
simultaneous durability and flexibility. For instance, in the papers
here, whiteness simultaneously operates as an often unrecognized and
unmarked category manifest in color-blind aspirations of equality and
as an icon of purity and innocence, delineating which bodies deserve
protection and which do not.

The common analytical project of the papers is to make whiteness
apprehensible (to borrow from Thakor) in domains where it is often
thought by key actors to be irrelevant, non-existent, and/or
undetectable. One way to approach these papers as a whole is to place
them in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness, an
approach that locates whiteness as “an ongoing and unfinished history,
which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they
‘take up’ space” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 150). Each of these essays locates
specific histories of whiteness that orient questions of technology, of
labor and capital, and of the figure of the human itself. They
demonstrate how whiteness is articulated in multiple ways and along
many other axes, including gender, class, nationalism, sexuality,
criminality, and (neo)liberality. Ahmed (2007) advocates attention to
“how whiteness becomes worldly through the noticeability of the arrival
of some bodies more than others” (p. 150), and these essays help us to
think how technoscience is constitutive of this worldliness.

Rendering whiteness as worldly in Ahmed’s sense is central to the
projects described in these papers. As the papers demonstrate, the
power of whiteness often lies in its invisibility, especially in its
most powerful formulations: freedom, humanity, innocence, purity, and
masculinity. As Ahmed (2007) reminds us, “A phenomenology of
whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is
behind, what does not get seen as the background to social action, to
the surface in a certain way” (p. 165). What links these projects
across a range of sites is the way in which they orient themselves
along axes of whiteness—both visible (“white loss,” “authentications of
whiteness,” the whiteness of the victim of sex trafficking) and
invisible (the naturalization of evolutionary logics foundational to
processes of settler colonialism and imperialism).

Each of these technoscientific assemblages mobilizes whiteness either
explicitly, as in Keilty’s discussion of white nationalist iconography
in gay pornography and Atanasoski and Vora’s discussion of the
border-wall video, or more tacitly in the language of freedom and
creativity that attends to displaced white (male) bodies in the global
economy and the mobilization of colonial, evolutionary rhetorics (Irani,
Nguyen, Schaeffer). As Nguyen, Irani, and Schaeffer demonstrate,
“freedom” and “design think” and “automated life” are not stable,
neutral concepts simply oriented to universal questions of human
flourishing but rather rely on organizing logics of whiteness for their
articulation and materialization in worlds of technoculture.

Another way to think about these papers is in relation not simply to
normative whiteness but also to white supremacy. Loretta Ross defines
white supremacy as “a set of ideas generated to create wealth in the
United States and reserve it for the benefit of a certain group of
people, originally property-owning White men” (Ross, 2016, p. 3; see
also Harris, 1993). Ross makes the link between white supremacy and
capitalism clear. The power of whiteness rests not only with its
durability but also its flexible articulation with capitalist logics of
accumulation. Yet, as Safiya Umoja Noble reminds us, we must
expand

our
definitions of white supremacy to include how global flows of capital
from US corporations and Silicon Valley structure labor markets and
material infrastructures that are part of an oppressive system of
digital technological engagements, largely hidden from view in the
consumerist model of technology adoption (Noble, 2016).

In order to pursue these themes further in a global context, I now turn
to a brief discussion of labor and its theoretical centrality to this
set of papers.

Labor

The essays in this volume move beyond well-rehearsed concerns about
privacy and access that often orient critiques of digitization.
Instead, they focus on labor and its continuing centrality to
understanding forms of racial capitalism (see Melamed, 2015) in the
digital age. They engage with “the labor concept’s myriad entanglements
with exclusionary categories of race, nation, gender, sexuality,
disability, and species” (Herzig & Subramaniam, 2017, p. 104),
further problematizing the concept of the digital divide and questions
of technoscientific access (see also Eubanks, 2011; Noble, 2018). As
Atanasoski and Vora elsewhere argue,

the
processes through which racialized, gendered, and sexualized spheres of
life and labor are seemingly elided by technological surrogates, even
as these spheres are replicated in emergent modes of work, violence,
and economies of desire (Atanasoski & Vora, 2015, p. 3).

Such
shifts are not incidental to the global reorganization of labor in the
digital age; rather, they are constitutive of it. Technoscientific
dimensions of digital labor consolidate older inequalities and manifest
new ones. Whiteness continues to be a key axis around which labor is
organized.
Nguyen’s piece in particular points to the centrality of affective
labor in negotiations around the use of open source software. She
further reminds us that mere access to technology in sites such as
Vietnam does not necessarily eliminate hierarchy and create the
conditions for freedom. Rather, European “fantasies for flattened
social relations insidiously mask the racialized structures of power
and naturalize such feelings”. Irani’s discussion of the slogan, “Math
is easy. Design is hard,” reorients our longstanding racialized
understandings of intellectual “capacity.” Instead, Irani demonstrates
how “design thinking” and the ascendance of (white) creative industries
in the twenty-first century work to “naturalize mathematical skill at
precisely the moment when Indian and Chinese workers become available
as a labor pool to perform that kind of work in a globally networked
capitalism”.

Both Thakor and Keilty reference what Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi term
“heteromation,” a new form of capitalist accumulation dependent on “the
extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in
computer-mediated networks” (Ekbia & Nardi, 2017, p. 1). The global
dimensions of digital labor become clear in Thakor’s discussion of the
“difficult and disposable work” of computer content mediation (CCM) in
anti-trafficking domains and in Keilty’s attention to the politics of
digital infrastructure.

Schaeffer’s discussion of biorobotics and its attempts to marshall the
potential of non-human life forms such as bees and termites gestures
toward the figure of the non-human as laborer. Schaeffer demonstrates
the abiding scientific faith in the emancipatory potential of
automation to free humans from dangerous and undesirable labor. But as
Donna Haraway reminds us, this view is an oft-repeated “mistake,” a
mistake that sees “freedom only in the absence of labor and necessity”
and forgets “the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and
through the use of one another's bodies” (Haraway, 2008, p. 79).
Building on Atanasoski's and Vora's discussion of labor, and deeply
resonating with Keilty’s discussion of white nationalism in mainstream
gay pornography, Schaeffer argues that “fascist visual iconography
ironically shares interpretive logic with the democratic lure of bee
colonies” (#). Schaeffer demonstrates that desires to tame and control
labor through biorobotics imagines a world without “the potential
threat of mass human laborers whose likelihood of revolt grows as they
increase in numbers, or when they become a self-organizing mass who
evolves into an intelligent, or even rebellious swarm” (#).

This focus on labor interrupts the ubiquitous narratives of freedom and
creativity that attach to technoscience, especially in the United
States. These papers move us beyond pristine design studios made for
human flourishing in a post-racial, post-labor world; they do not let
us forget the laboring body, the clunky infrastructure of cables, the
blood and dirt of mineral extraction, and the excess of “techno-trash.”
They further demonstrate the ongoing centrality of whiteness ─ in its
multiple and heterogeneous manifestations ─ to the ongoing organization
of global labor.

Conclusion

There continues to be great faith in the transcendental possibilities
of techoscience. In a recent series, “Machine Bias: Investigating
Algorithmic Injustice,” the news site ProPublica warns, “If we are not intelligent about how we train our robots, they will perpetuate the worst of human behavior” (ProPublica,
2016). In other words, while perhaps humans are not capable of moving
beyond race, machines might be. Although rightly critical of
techoscience and its potentiality to reinforce and exacerbate extant
structures of racism, such a position nevertheless presumes that
artificial intelligence (AI) itself can escape the racial logics and
racist contexts of its creators and users. Jessie Daniels describes
this as “the fantasy that the Internet as a technology is color-blind
with regard to race” (Daniels, 2015, p. 1378; see also Noble, 2018).
This assumes that such functions can be (re)programmed to avoid “bias”
and thus work outside the realm of the (racial) cultural. In other
words, this position believes that the techno in technoculture can save the cultural from itself. These papers are a critical intervention in such assumptions.

Each of these papers individually reminds us that accounts of whiteness
and technoscience cannot begin and end with the election of Trump in
the United States. In an era marked by ascendant white supremacy
and white nationalism, the attention given by these essays to both the
histories and futures of whiteness in its technoscientific
manifestations is urgent and essential.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to the panel organizers for inviting me to participate in this project, the editors of Catalyst for their support, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

BioJennifer Hamilton is
Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Anthropology at Hampshire
College and Director of the Five College Women's Studies Research
Center. Her research and teaching focuses on the anthropology of law,
science, and medicine, postcolonial feminist science and technology
studies, and the contemporary politics of indigeneity. She is the
author of Indigeneity in the Courtroom: Law, Culture, and the Production of Difference in North American Courts (Routledge 2009) and is currently completing a second book manuscript, The Indian in the Freezer: The Genomic Quest for Indigeneity.